It is widely recognized that changes are occurring to the earth's climate and, further, that these changes threaten important human interests. This raises the question of who should bear the burdens of addressing global climate change. This paper aims to provide an answer to this question. To do so it focuses on the principle that those who cause the problem are morally responsible for solving it (the ‘polluter pays’ principle). It argues that while this has considerable appeal it cannot provide a complete account of who should bear the burdens of global climate change. It proposes three ways in which this principle needs to be supplemented, and compares the resulting moral theory with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’.

Successive ICJ Presidents have expressed concern about the proliferation of international tribunals and substantive fragmentation of international law. This is not a new phenomenon. International law has always lacked a clear normative and institutional hierarchy. The problem is more how new institutions have used international law to further new interests, especially those not predominant in traditional law. The anxiety among ICJ judges should be seen less as a concern for abstract “coherence” than a worry about the demise of traditional principles of diplomatic law and the Court's privileged role as their foremost representative. As jurisdictional conflicts reflect divergent political priorities, it is unclear that administrative co-ordination can eliminate them. This does not, however, warrant excessive worries over fragmentation; it is an institutional expression of political pluralism internationally.

The article conceives international (or global) constitutionalism as a legal argument which recommends and strengthens efforts (legal and political) to compensate for ongoing de-constitutionalization on the domestic level. Although the notions ‘international constitution’ and ‘international constitutionalism’ have in recent years served as buzzwords in various discourses, the many meanings of those concepts have not yet been fully explored and disentangled. This paper suggests a specific understanding of those concepts. It highlights various aspects and elements of micro- and macro-constitutionalization in international law, and identifies anti-constitutionalist trends. On this basis, the paper finds that, although no international constitution in a formal sense exists, fundamental norms in the international legal order do fulfil constitutional functions. Because those norms can reasonably be qualified as having a constitutional quality, they may not be summarily discarded in the event of a conflict with domestic constitutional law. Because the relevant norms form a transnational constitutional network, and cannot be aligned in an abstract hierarchy, conflict resolution requires a balancing of interests in concrete cases. Finally, because constitutionalism historically and prescriptively means asking for a legitimate constitution, a constitutionalist reading of the international legal order provokes the question of its legitimacy. This question is pressing, because state sovereignty and consent are – on good grounds – no longer accepted as the sole source of legitimacy of international law. International constitutionalism – as understood in this paper – does not ask for state-like forms of legitimacy of a world government, but stimulates the search for new mechanisms to strengthen the legitimacy of global governance.

The general narrative of international criminal law (ICL) declares that the system adheres in an exemplary manner to the fundamental principles of a liberal criminal justice system. Recent scholarship has increasingly questioned the adherence of various ICL doctrines to such principles. This article scrutinizes the discourse of ICL – the assumptions and forms of argumentation that are regarded as sound reasoning with appropriate liberal aims. This article argues that ICL, in drawing on national criminal law and international human rights law, absorbed contradictory assumptions and methods of reasoning. The article explores three modes by which the assumptions of human rights liberalism subtly undermine the criminal law liberalism to which the system aspires. These modes include interpretive approaches, substantive and structural conflation, and ideological assumptions. The identity crisis theory helps to explain how a system that strives to serve as a model for liberal criminal justice systems has come to embrace illiberal doctrines that contradict the system's fundamental principles.

The growing sense of urgency regarding various global environmental problems has prompted calls for global legislative processes that could produce binding outcomes. However, as law-making gravitates into international forums, questions are raised regarding the legitimacy of international environmental governance. Much law-making today occurs under multilateral environmental agreements (‘MEAs’), such as the Climate Change Convention and its Kyoto Protocol. The article examines the role of Conferences of the Parties (‘COPs’) in MEA-based law-making. It juxtaposes the standard conception of international law-making and an alternative account, which sees law-making not simply as crystallized in formal consent procedures but as continuous interactional processes. The interactional account can help build the foundations for legitimate international environmental governance, and can provide important guidance to law-makers, even as they, even as they continue to operate within a formal, consent-based framework.

Various human rights are widely recognized in codified and customary international law. These human rights promise all human beings protection against specific severe harms that might be inflicted on them domestically or by foreigners. Yet international law also establishes and maintains institutional structures that greatly contribute to violations of these human rights: fundamental components of international law systematically obstruct the aspirations of poor populations for democratic self-government, civil rights, and minimal economic sufficiency. And central international organizations, such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank, are designed so that they systematically contribute to the persistence of severe poverty.

On 30 September 2011, the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen in what has become the most controversial incident of US ‘targeted killing’, or, as its critics would prefer, of the US practice of ‘extrajudicial executions’. This controversy over wording expresses a profound disagreement over the legal status of the US drone program. Target killing suggests that the drone program may be legally regulated. Extrajudicial execution suggests that it falls outside the realm of legality. This article does not seek to settle which terminology is the most appropriate. Instead it analyses the legal expertise struggling to do so and its implications. More specifically, it focuses on the processes through which drones constitute the legal expertise that constitutes the drone program as one of targeted killings and of extrajudicial executions; that is, on a process of co-constitution. Drawing theoretical inspiration from and combining new materialist approaches (especially as articulated by Bruno Latour) with the sociological approach of Pierre Bourdieu, the article shows that drones have ‘agency’ in the ‘field’ of legal expertise pertaining to the drone program. Drones are redrawing the boundaries of legal expertise both by making associations to new forms of expertise and by generating technological expert roles. They are also renegotiating what is valuable to expertise. Drones are making both transparency and secrecy core to expertise. However, and contrary to what is often claimed, this agency does not inescapably lead to the normalization of targeted killings. The article therefore concludes that acknowledging the agency of drones is important for understanding how legal expertise is formed but especially for underscoring the continued potential for controversy and politics.

This article considers the idea that the professional and intellectual disciplines which have developed in the United States to advance insight into international affairs also have characteristic blind spots and biases which leave professionals and intellectuals working within them more sanguine about the status quo than they might otherwise be. I am particularly interested in blind spots and bias which emerge from interactions among the disciplines of public international law, international economic law, comparative law, and international relations. Although internationalists in the United states working in these disciplines have broadly divergent methodologies and political ideologies, they share a sensibility which narrows the range of concerns and the scope of political possibilities which seem plausible to professionals and intellectuals concerned with international law and policy.

The introduction explains how this essay articulates the issue of ‘justice after war’ from the point of view of just-war theory, and how such a view can and ought to impact upon international law, for instance by inspiring the eventual development of a new treaty, or Geneva Convention, exclusively concerned with issues of postwar justice. In the body of the essay, attention is first given to explaining why just-war theory has traditionally ignored, or even rejected, jus post bellum. Second, argument is made as to why this ignorance and rejection must be overcome, and replaced with information and inclusion. Third, principles drawing on traditional just-war theory are constructed and defended, for jus post bellum in general and for forcible postwar regime change in particular. Finally, several remaining challenges are addressed, seeking to dissolve doubts and strengthen resolve towards working for progress on this vital and topical issue of jus post bellum.

The extraterritoriality or extraterritorial application of international and European human rights treaties refers to the recognition by those treaties' states parties of the international and European human rights of individuals or groups of individuals situated outside their territory and, in a second stage, to the identification of their corresponding duties to those individuals. Examples of extraterritoriality abound in international human rights practice, and in particular in the European Court of Human Rights’ case law. Except for vague and often misleading gestures to the universality of human rights, which allegedly requires their extraterritorial application, however, many of the normative considerations underlying the extraterritorial applicability of human rights have not been broached in the human rights law literature. Nor, conversely, have human rights theorists, even among those who take the supply side of human rights seriously, devoted much attention to the threshold criteria for the abstract recognition of human rights and the trigger of the corresponding duties. To remedy some of those shortcomings, this article endeavours to bring some normative human rights theorizing to bear on the European Court of Human Rights’ recent practice on extraterritoriality. More specifically, the article delves deeper into the notion of ‘jurisdiction’ qua threshold criterion for the applicability of the European Convention on Human Rights both within and outside its states parties’ territories; distinguishes it from related notions such as authority, coercion, power, or control; and explains its normative consequences.

This article explores the composition of the emerging international value system, including its hierarchical components. It also contrasts this fragile international value system with the more strongly developed European value system (European public order), as concretized by the European Convention on Human Rights and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. It first argues that international human rights norms constitute the ‘core content’ of a constantly evolving and layered international value system. Within this value system, a special but fragile hierarchical status is granted to those human rights norms that qualify as jus cogens and/or erga omnes norms. Thereafter it explores the manner in which the European Court of Human Rights has concretized the normative superiority of obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights for member states vis-à-vis other norms of public international law, to the extent that a conflict between these norms arises. It concludes by examining whether these developments could also strengthen the international value system through a spill-over effect via the work of international human rights bodies and national courts. This, in turn, would strengthen the ability of the international value system to determine the outcome of conflicts between international obligations stemming from different international regimes.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein declared: ‘We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.’ Michel Foucault in turn repeatedly referred to his method of study as description, arguing that the role of philosophy is not to reveal what is hidden, but rather to make us see what is seen. This essay suggests why the turn to description as a mode of legal writing might be a productive move at this time.

Accountability has become a cornerstone of current discussion on the prospects of legitimate and effective global governance. In spite of its rather high currency, accountability does not partake in the select group of first-order political ideals: democracy, human rights, constitutionalism and rule of law have all been historically uttered in much more vocal tones and still remain at the forefront of public demands for legitimate authority. Rather than radiating a comprehensive legal or political vision, accountability supplies a power-constraining toolbox that allows for a variety of more or less attractive permutations. This rather commonplace story, though, tells very little about the concrete configurations, underlying values and ends of accountability. The concept of accountability remains unstable because, among other things, its descriptive and normative aspects lack a clearer articulation; traditional taxonomies fail to precisely illuminate its political and extra-political instantiations, and their respective connection with law; the relevant descriptive variables that shape accountability arrangements are not yet systematized in a comprehensive way; the specific normative goals that lurk behind the calls for more accountability tend to be taken for granted, and the trade-offs or internal tensions that necessarily occur are usually camouflaged. Conceptual clarification, thus, is indispensable whenever one comes across such multifaceted umbrella terms. The article attempts to diagnose such shortcomings, to elucidate a minimalist concept of accountability and to provide a large analytical map that can aid both the description and the critical assessment of accountability arrangements in light of their potential purposes. This analytical exercise is a pivotal starting point if accountability is to get a better grip on the debates about the improvement of global governance.

This article asserts the emergence of multi-level global governance through an analysis of the relationship between the International Criminal Court and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The article suggests a far deeper set of influences than previously anticipated, presenting research on how the ICC is directly influencing Congolese domestic politics and how some actors within the Congo are seeking to manipulate the Court for their own political benefit. Further, the article considers the self-referral by the Congolese government, the early impact of complementarity, and efforts at judicial reform in the Congo. In the process the article develops a set of criteria to evaluate the ‘total or substantial collapse’ provisions of the complementarity regime.

The interpenetration of global political and economic life has placed questions of ‘political economy’ on the scholarly agenda across the social sciences. The author argues that international law could contribute to understanding and transforming centre–periphery patterns of dynamic inequality in global political economic life. The core elements of both economic and political activity – capital, labour, credit, and money, as well as public or private power and right – are legal institutions. Law is the link binding centres and peripheries to one another and structuring their interaction. It is also the vernacular through which power and wealth justify their exercise and shroud their authority. The author proposes rethinking international law as a terrain for political and economic struggle rather than as a normative or technical substitute for political choice, itself indifferent to natural flows of economic activity.

At the beginning of the renaissance of international criminal law in the 1990s, the law on crimes against humanity was in a fragile state. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) decisively contributed to the consolidation of customary international law on crimes against humanity and paved the way for its first comprehensive codification in Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). At the same time, the ICTY in its early decisions already showed a certain inclination to broaden the scope of the application of the crime by downgrading its contextual requirement. More recently, this tendency culminated in the complete abandonment of the policy requirement. While this ‘progressive’ facet of the ICTY's jurisprudence largely took the form of obiter dicta, the Situation in the Republic of Kenya has confronted the ICC with the need to ‘get serious’ about the present state of the law. This has led to a controversy in Pre-Trial Chamber II about the concept of organization in Article 7(2)(a) of the Statute. While the majority essentially follows the path of the more recent case law of the ICTY, the ICTR, and the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone and supports a liberal interpretation, Judge Kaul prefers to confine the term to state-like organizations and generally calls for caution against too hasty an expansion of the realm of international criminal law stricto sensu. This comment agrees with the main thrust of the Dissenting Opinion and hopes that it will provoke a thorough debate.

Among the major crises threatening humanity today, forcing some 20 million people to flee their countries as refugees and displacing some 30 million people within the borders of their countries, are violent internal conflicts, systematic violations of human rights, massive denials of democratic freedoms, and frustration of sustainable, environmentally sensitive development. Although mostly grounded in domestic jurisdictions, these crises often result in human rights tragedies of grave concern to the international community. In this article, the focus lies on the state's sovereignty to underscore its responsibilities and accountability to both domestic and international constituencies.

This paper will address an often-neglected agenda of the much-derided League of Nations: its ‘social’ and ‘technical’ works. These targeted human security through regulating different forms of international mobility, including the fight against trafficking in women and children. The League used conventions and conferences to commit nation-states, in a legal model, to standardized anti-trafficking measures. It also, however, worked to educate and inform states, voluntary organizations, and the general public about the nature of trafficking and the ways of combating it. The latter techniques are here interpreted using Foucault's governmentality writings, which encourage us to look beyond the juridical epistemologies of international relations and international law, but not beyond the interlacing of laws and norms, here explored through interwar League governmentalities.

This article examines the existence, nature, and content of the non-intervention principle in contemporary international law, concentrating on the application of the principle to areas other than the use of force. It looks at the historical development of the principle and the sources and evidence of the law, in particular resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the decisions of the International Court of Justice, and the practice of states. The article then considers some specific treaty-based applications of the principle, and explores how far the principle may apply to non-treaty, non-forcible situations. It next considers a number of circumstances that may preclude the wrongfulness of intervention (Security Council authorization, consent, and countermeasures), before drawing some tentative conclusions.

From time immemorial amnesty has been employed as a means of promoting a political settlement and advancing reconciliation in societies that have emerged from repression. At present there is a trend in support of prosecution of those who have committed international crimes, such as torture and crimes against humanity, which excludes the possibility of amnesty. That amnesty is no longer favored is illustrated by the failure of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to recognize amnesty as a defence to prosecution. While there is no place for unconditional amnesty in the contemporary international legal order an intermediate solution such as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission with power to grant amnesty after investigation, of the South African kind, may contribute to the achievement of peace and justice in a society in transition more effectively than mandatory prosecution.